The Daily Novel

A Daily Novel gong for Andrew Pierce of The Daily Telegraph for his article this morning on the battle over whether the Catholic adoption agencies should have a special exemption from the equalities legislation. Because he discloses the intimate details of his own life, which is still pretty unusual amongst mainstream male British journalists. I am all for transparency by journalists, particularly when dealing with issues like this whiich raises very powerful feelings and prejudices on both sides of the debate. The most poignant paragraph is this one:

Sadly, I have no memories of life in Nazareth House (the Catholic orphanage in which he lived until the age of two). Nor do I remember Margaret Connolly (his birth mother), who was encouraged by the nuns to visit the son she loved, but could not cope as a single parent in the harsh moral climate of the 1960s.

His article did leave me curious to know more, however. Even the Jesuits say they need to have a child til the age of seven in order to guarantee a lifelong allegiance to the Pope. Was Pierce converted in his later life? Or were this adoptive parents Catholic?

The article was a salutary reminder to me, that my own position on Catholicism and gays is still influenced by the accidents of my personal biography, despite the efforts of my reasoning mind.

My own views on Catholicism are still influenced by my Sundays in the church of my youth, which went through four changes off vicar, which took it from a plain near Methodist place of worship to an Anglo-Catholicism, with all the pomp and circumstance and incense that surrounds the Pope. My father hated the change, because the important thing for him, as self-educated working class, was to think things out for yourself. And to him Catholicism was the antithesis of that.

My views on homosexuality took much longer to form. I truly cannot remember ever have met a homosexual until I was in my early twenties. (Which shows something about my own incredible naivity as well as the taboos of the times.) For a long time I thought that homosexuality was a disease you caught from the English upper middle classes if you got sent to public school.

My awakening came around 1960 when an American made a pass at me in the shower when we weekending in a large house in New Jersey. He was overcome with remorse when he found I was not gay and we became firm friends. It was from him that I got some notion of how it felt to be gay, and the difficulties it produced when growing up in a society which saw homosexuality as either bad, mad or ‘the English disease’.